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Tag: language

10 hints to write clearly (free ebook)

05/04/2023 /

HC3010536Diplomats, like many other professionals, have to write many different types of documents. Whatever the type — legislation, a technical report, minutes, a press release or speech — a clear document will be more effective, and more easily and quickly understood.

The European Commission (Directorate-General for Translation) has published a few years ago a simple guide titled with many useful and practical hints (not rules) on “how to write clearly“.

Here are the 10 hints included in the publication:
1. Think before you write
2. Focus on the reader
3. Get your document into shape
4. KISS:Keep It Short and Simple
5. Make sense
6. Cut out excess nouns
7. Be concrete, not abstract
8. Prefer active verbs to passive
9. Beware of false friends, jargon and abbreviations
10. Revise and check

The guide is available in all 23 official languages of the European Union.
You can find the online version here  (choose the preferred language)

The benefits of learning a new language

09/06/2021 /

English has become the world’s universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language?

In this TED talk, Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits of learning an unfamiliar tongue, which can be summarised as:

  1. If you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. There’s no other way.
  2. It’s been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. Bilingualism is healthy.
  3. Languages are just lot of fun.
  4. We live in an era when it’s never been easier to teach yourself another language.

 

4 reasons to learn a new language

11/01/2017 /

English is fast becoming the world’s universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language?

In this TED talk, Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits of learning an unfamiliar tongue, which can be summarised as:

  1. If you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. There’s no other way.
  2. It’s been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. Bilingualism is healthy.
  3. Languages are just lot of fun.
  4. We live in an era when it’s never been easier to teach yourself another language.

 

language

 

Image source: Flickr – Jurek d. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

How to Learn a New Language in Six Months

10/03/2015 /

Chris Lonsdale is a psychologist from New Zealand who runs a company in Hong Kong. After spending many years assessing all of the research available on language learning, he was able to formulate five principles and seven actions that will allow any adult to learn a new language and speak it fluently in six months.

Discover Lonsdale’s approach in his TED Talk.

How to learn 1,000 foreign words in 22 hours

14/01/2014 /

How much time do we need to learn a foreign language?

According to Joshua Foer, an American journalist who learnt Lingala – a Bantu language spoken in the North West of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-, you just need 22 hours spread over a period of 10 weeks.

He used Memrise, a web app that teaches foreign languages through a game based on the repetition of words and their audio pronunciation. The trick is to assign to each word a “memo”, that can be an image, a sound, a rhyme, a video or just a note on the etymology of the word.

The idea behind Memrise is making the study of a foreign language a fun practice by using the internet as a social gaming and by exploiting the potential of our memory.

Read full article http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months

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